While it may not lead directly to impassioned critiques of climate governance, nor immediately sort the sceptics from the believers, talk of brewing storms or dried-up reservoirs now carries with it a whiff of trepidation about our collective forecasts.

Bridging the divide

Despite the growing politicisation of weather talk, weather and climate are usually understood as empirically distinct bodies of knowledge. Climate is, to quote British comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, “a long-term trend averaged over many years”, as opposed to weather, “which is what’s going on outside the window right now”.

The problem with this distinction is that climate change’s global reach and extended time scale can make it seem like it is happening somewhere else and to someone else (or, indeed, not at all). So perhaps the distinction is not useful for the cultural processes of adaptation. What might happen if we were to breach official definitions and disciplinary lines and think of the two things together?

Closing the distance between weather as event and climate as pattern can accomplish several things. Most obviously, it reminds us that there is a relationship between the two. Without weather, there would be nothing to amalgamate as climate.

While one heatwave does not equate to “climate change”, many and increasing ones give us pause to wonder. Leslie Hughes and Will Steffen are doing the data-driven work in this regard.

In other words, bringing climate and weather together can remind us that climate change is not only about abstract calculations on scales too big for our small and ultimately short-lived human forms to fathom.

Thinking about weather as part of climate underscores that we experience climate change with and on our bodies; climate change is lived by us at a very human scale, too.

The daily experience of weathering

So, what would it mean to harness the daily, mundane intrusions of weather as political? In contrast to terms like resilience (complicit with neoliberal incitements of bootstrapping) or sustainability (which suggests we get to keep something intact), weathering invites us to consider what we will lose along the way.

Weathered bodies, weathered houses, weathered cars, weathered clothes, weathered relationships, weathered dreams – these all bear scars of what has worn them down, and of what they have been asked to carry, to survive, and to hack.

Weathering leaves the scars of both what has been lost and what has been survived.Development Planning Unit at University College London/flickr

Bringing this sense of lived climate change to our everyday perception is neither an easy nor comfortable thing. For one, discomfort is not a place we generally like to dwell for long. In a more political sense, though, paying attention to the weather as something in which we are intimately implicated, not just a disconnected backdrop to our human dramas, reminds us we are weather-makers too.

On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we’re creating, the background becomes the highest drama.

This could be the epigraph for the Anthropocene.

Even in wealthy, climate-controlled places, weather inserts a reminder of one’s privilege, or luck, or vulnerability, or hardship, into those once mundane spaces. We may bemoan the slipping away of vacuous weather chats — “does everything have to be political?” — but perhaps noticing the weather can become an opening for everyday engagement in the politics of climate change instead.

In gender and cultural studies and the environmental humanities, rather than trying to leave weather-talk pregnant with fear, anticipation or political outrage, we are explicitly thinking with and through the weather to develop strategies for a rigorous and political response to climate change.

One way we are doing this is through a tactic or practice we call “weathering” – that is, cultivating attunement to how our own bodies, and bodies of others, experience weather. This includes how we and they manage it architecturally, technologically, professionally and socially.

We don’t all weather equally

Through the concept of “weathering”, our work forces a confrontation between large-scale climate data and embodied sociopolitical experiences that are too often treated as separate. It also underscores the politics and activism we hope this tactic can engender.

Such attentive acclimatisation reveals that, even though we’re all in the same planetary boat when it comes to global warming, we’re not all in it in the same way. This is something ecofeminists and environmental justice scholars have long known. Our work helps articulate how difference also marks our apparently banal encounters with the weather.

At a “Hacking the Anthropocence” symposium in Sydney this month, scholars, artists and activists are responding to the idea of “weathering”. The variety of experience that such a provocation reveals is astounding.

For Anne Werner’s and Genevieve Derwent’s work growing chickens on Autumn Farm and Cameron Muir’s reflections on life jackets for refugees, the weather holds a very different significance and function. Climate change is undoubtedly political – but all the more so because of these uneven individual and collective experiences of the weather.

Other kinds of bodily, socioeconomic, historical and geopolitical differences further complicate how we weather the world. When it comes to rising sea levels, or dried-up water holes, for example, racism, colonialism and gendered labour are all significant. Weathering as a concept thus asks us to think about what else, besides meteorological phenomena, one might be asked to weather.

We may all be in the same planetary boat, but we’re not all in it in the same way.yeowatzup/flickr

Note that a more common meaning of “weathering” is as synonym for withstanding or enduring. Not only will different regions weather differently in a changing climate (drier, hotter in central Australia; more flooding on the US Atlantic coast; disappearing land in Pacific Islands), but people within those regions weather differently too.

A world weathering together

Our human experiences of weather are linked to how the non-human world is weathering what we have forced it to carry. Artist Victoria Hunt will ask us to imagine with her “The Cry of Water”, while archaeologist Denis Byrne will explore the significance of seawalls, which are weathered by erosion. Human and non-human worlds weather together in a fraught and desirous intimacy.

The animal world is also constantly weathering. We know about catastrophic events such as the endangered bats that cannot cope with heat above 42℃. We’ve learned that the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching as water temperatures rise.

But what about the less-well-known water-holding frog or, indeed, ants and brine shrimp? How do they weather? At our symposium, Rebecca Giggs, Kate Wright and Emily O’Gorman (respectively) will let us know how, and suggest what we humans might learn about weathering the world differently.

These contributions invite us to explore how our experiences of the weather are highly mediated by a range of social, political and cultural forces. Anthropologist of institutions Tess Lea will investigate how bureaucracy (materialised as mountains of paperwork) orients different populations’ capacity to weather. Cli-fi expert and petrocultures scholar Stephanie LeMenager invites us to speculate on what a new kind of civic engagement might look like in this context.

Weathering directly connects human social, cultural and economic structures such as racism, colonialism and gender oppression to climate change. It insists that we think about global warming on a massive scale as always textured by acute experiences of social phenomena.

We recognise that the weight of a changing climate will not be borne equally by bodies – across geographies, economic status, or species.

So next time you curse a forgotten umbrella as the skies open up, or welcome the sun shining on your kid’s birthday party in the park, remember that when it comes to the weather, the personal is getting more and more political.

Hacking the Anthropocene II: Weathering (May 25-31) is supported by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC); the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions; the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney; the Planetary Health Initiative at the University of Sydney; and the Seed Box: a MISTRA-FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (hosted at Linkoping University, Sweden).

2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

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Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

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Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au